“When freelancers start seeing you give one or two entries a high rating, they will just start copying those ones and making slight changes,” Tim Nolan, co-owner of television recycling business TV Doctor Sale and Service LLC (www.cash4brokentvs.com), shares these words of wisdom to fellow contest holders at Freelancer.com, the world’s largest crowdsourcing platform. “You lose most of genuine creativity as they stop coming up with unique designs and try to recreate or improve on the ones you rate the highest.”

Tim knows what he’s talking about as the Contest is his preferred means of posting his projects on Freelancer.com. He has had a logo and website mockup done with a combined number of entries reaching over 200. “We love contests because you can see so many options for the price of one.”

In selecting the winners, he considers price and quality as the two most important considerations. “We look at results,” he says. “We mostly looked at previously completed works of the freelancers in order to determine our best choice.” He also used the site’s chat feature to hold in-depth discussions about his requirements and expectations. “Only after speaking with them for quite some time did we decide that they were who we wanted.”

His final selection process is quite simple: “We choose the design completely based on our taste. When we saw what we liked, we knew it was the one. Then we hold a poll among family, friends, and employees; they agreed. Basically, we looked at a bunch of submissions and chose the one that was most pleasing to our eye.”

The overall Freelancer.com experience is “awesome,” according to Tim. “We have high-quality results quicker than we would have ever gotten locally and for a fraction of the price. Our website alone costs 80% less than a local company’s quote!”

The decision to join the Freelancer.com community was purely practical. TV Doctor is a small startup that buys broken television sets to provide consumers with an environmentally- and economically- conscious means of disposing old TVs. While the company has been in existence in North Florida for over 25 years as a repair center, it just recently launched its TV recycling division. With little cash to spare, they needed to find a partner that would provide good quality work at an affordable price. “We had a friend who used Freelancer® with good success and so we decided to give it a try.”

Following the success of the website mockup contest, he had the entire website built on the platform via direct project posting. The same freelancer who won in the contest was awarded the project. “He took our design and made it 1000% better,” says Tim. “He also submitted a more than reasonable bid to build our website for US$222, which was significantly less than what we were quoted locally.” The freelancer also added a content management program at no extra cost and taught Tim how to use it so that he could change some aspects of the site himself if he so wishes.

“The end result is that for under US$300, we have a logo and a website we can manage ourselves,” says Tim, “which will save us tons of money down the road by not having to pay someone every time we want to change a word on the site. We have already saved over US$1,400 and expect to have more savings down the road.”